Thursday, March 19, 2009

The number of people who browse the Internet on their cell phones is on the rise and if your website is not accessible via mobile phones or is not mobile friendly, you are losing a large portion of potential traffic.

Creating a mobile friendly version of your website is very easy and there are large number of free services out there waiting for you to use. Take a look at some of these online tools and find out which suits your requirements.

1. Mofuse: If your website has an RSS feed, you can create a mobile website out of it using Mofuse. This is the one I’m using to create the mobile version of this site (http://m.instantfundas.com). Sign-up for an account, enter your RSS feed, choose a sub-domain like yoursite.mofuse.mobi and you have a cell phone as well as iPhone friendly website. You can also use a custom domain name.

Mofuse allows a lot of customization such as adding new pages and links to your mobile site, adding logos, changing colors etc. It also has their own Google Analytics like tracking tool to keep track of your mobile visitors. Publishers can also show Google Adsense ads and split the revenue 50/50 with Mofuse. It has pretty much all that you can ask for a price of zero bucks!

2. Mippin is another tool that turns an RSS feed into a mobile website. It’s pretty straightforward but customization options are limited – you can upload logos and change font color and type but you cannot use custom domains, so it isn't something I would like to use. You also cannot track your mobile visitors. But you can monetize your website and you get to keep all of the revenue

3. Wirenode is a very basic mobile website creation tool. Customization options in Wirenode is even more limited. It offers some pre-made templates to use on your site and allows some minor modifications like font color and background color. It has no support for custom domains but it does have a visitor tracking tool.

4. Swift’s features are comparable to those offered by Mofuse. It has plenty of customization options, a lot more than what Mofuse provides and it’s possible to make your website sport a completely unique look. This means that you can customize everything from logos, to link colors and backgrounds and the position of various elements. It also has their own analytics tool for visitors tracking and supports custom domain.

The only downside of Swift is that it adds a small advertisement banner to your pages and no, it does not share the revenue with you. If you upgrade to their Pro plan at $10 a month, you can get the banner removed.

5. Google Mobile Optimizer is the quickest way to convert any website into a mobile friendly one. Just supply the site URL and it will optimize the site for viewing in mobile phones by removing the site header, ads and resizing all image contents. This is actually an on-the-fly mobile site creation tool. There are no signups and no way to customize the look of your site. This is how Instant Fundas look as optimized by Google.

If you want to use this tool with a custom domain, you have to setup a redirect to this URL, provided your web hosting company supports sub domain redirects. Another way would be to use a URL shortening service but that would look very unprofessional.

Among the above tools, I prefer Mofuse, Swift and Google Mobile Optimizer in that order. I’m using Mofuse but if Swift allowed me to remove that banner, I would be have opted for Swift because it has better customization options. Google Mobile Optimizer is bland but quick and hassle free. Of course, if you aren’t so picky you can use any of these services.

25 comments:

I looked at the Google mobile version of Instant Fundas while being logged into Blogger (had just moderated a blog). The icon links for Delete and Edit appeared on the pages. Although they are clickable, you cannot do anything with them without having to log in -- thank god.

Also there are 'borders' around the image links which look kind of tacky. I guess it is filtering out all stylesheets? Would be nice to be able to style the content.

I use UNITY Mobile to create all my mobile sites. It’s kind of like mofuse, only instead of lots and lots of forms, UNITY Mobile has a mobile WYSIWYG editor which makes things very simple and easy to create and design profession mobile sites. There are a bunch of other services out there, but UNITY’s service alone is worth it.http://unitymobile.com